As a youth I hung out with a bunch of guys who were regulars in my parents' pub in the northwest of England. They were known as the Five Pints of Bitter Boys. I followed their lead, and British bitter ale, heavily hopped in many cases, became my first drink of choice.

When I moved to the U.S., I drank commercial American lager for a while, but since my beloved bitter ale wasn't readily available here at the time, I strayed from beer and became more of a spirits guy.

Then microbreweries came along, and suddenly there were all sorts of brews on the market. Nicely made they were, too, for the most part.

I tried stouts, lambics, pilsners, bocks, porters, wheat beers, red ales, brown ales, barley wines, saisons, and, well, you get the picture. I flirted with more or less every style of beer under the sun until I found my go-to beer: pale ale.

Pale ale and India pale ale both suit my palate, though I lean toward the bolder hop flavors in most IPAs. It's no wonder that pale ales are my beers of choice, though - they are simply British bitter ales in a bottle. I came full circle.

There are quite a few traditional mixed drinks made with a beer base, and most of them are long drinks. Lager and lime is a good example, and the shandy, a mixture of beer and lemon-lime soda, has been a popular thirst-quencher for well over a century. It's seldom, though, that we see cocktail-size drinks that call for beer as an ingredient.

Smokin' Hopps, a drink calling for a small amount of pale ale, was created by Seth Laufman at the Burritt Room in San Francisco, although Seth now works at Comstock Saloon.

Smokin' Hopps is just about as complex a dram as I've ever tasted, and how this bartender came to marry mezcal with pale ale is completely beyond my ken. It works, though, very well, indeed.

I'm not sure that the Five Pints of Bitter Boys would approve, but you never know.

Smokin' Hopps

Makes 1 drink

Adapted from a recipe by Seth Laufman of Burritt Room and Comstock Saloon in San Francisco.

2 ounces Vida or other mezcal

1/2 ounce Licor 43

1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice

1/2 ounce rich simple syrup (see Note)

2 ounces India pale ale

Instructions: Shake the mezcal, Licor 43, lemon juice and simple syrup over ice. Strain into a chilled fizz or Delmonico glass. Top with the ale and stir briefly.

Note: Rich simple syrup is made with 2 parts sugar to 1 part water; stir to dissolve the sugar.